I wouldn`t normally have walked to work, but that morning was simply irresistible.
Even the smog-filled suburbs of urbania seemed to lighten and be filled with a certain newness. Even rusting dumpsters and the grimy forms of drunks passed out from yesterday`s paycheck caught the light in a new and different way; and held it. Somehow the air was rid of the gagging stench of diesel, factory smoke, and corporate demand.
I could have stood for hours upon end, savoring such an impossibility in the city life. I could have stood for hours, but the moment only lasted a fleeting minute before it slipped away without a whisper of complaint; and I had missed my bus.
I was back to the unrelenting noise and stench, assaulting my senses with renewed vigor, in order to make good regrets for time lost.
As the sunbeams rolled back off the drunks and the dumpsters, I began to walk.
City life has never suited me, in fact; it poisons me.
It poisons me from the inside out, every aspect of it. The noise, the rush, the cut throat corporatism, but most of all the closed-in greyness of it all. Grey buildings climb on ether side of my head, reaching for a grey sky. I walk grey streets, with grey men and their grey cars blaring out an ode to grey.
There are times when I cannot stand it, and I retreat to a place within myself, for as long as that same rush will allow.
I had been filled with hope of a somewhat different morning the second I stepped into that moment, but hopes bloom and wilt like a daffodil, and mine are no different. Everything remained dank and grey, and my head was downcast.
In and out of my peripheral vision wandered the dirty brown form of an old dog, tail down, in desolation almost as great as mine. Almost.
The scarred ears of that woebegone creature caught my eye, the scarred ears of living on the street. They seemed to be in tatters, healed and re-healed like the brokenness of a setting sun. And like a setting sun, that old stray with its ripped up ears and its smell of dead rats held a beauty to my eyes.
The dog`s legs were covered with sores and infections of varying repulsiveness, it seemed impossible that the spindly appendages held up even such an emaciated body. In some places on the dog`s body fur was nonexistent, and the skin showing beneath was discolored and sickly.
We made eye contact, that dog and I, and in those eyes I saw something, we connected. I saw suffering and pain, and forgetfulness of all things good.
But despite this connection I hurried on, for fear of distraction.
An hour later I sat in a park, jobless, eyes closed in despair.
Late one too many times, he said. One too many times, and I pondered a life as that dog on the street.
A whining noise distracted me from my thoughts, a brown face with ragged ears, and a stench of dead rats. The old dog appeared in my vision as my eyes opened, wagging its tail with no great force, but with all the meager hope left in its body. Another time I might have recoiled from the ghastly sores and infections, but beggars cannot be choosers. I gently scratched the patch of skin which seemed least likely to cause pain.
Suffering seemed to pass from the dirty fur to my tentative fingers.
The night hung around me as I walked away from a dark form lying on the rail tracks before the approaching form of a brightly lit tram. The dark form lifted a dark head, looked at first the tram, and then me. A tail slapped the ground gently as in the light of an onrushing tram the dark form lowered its dark head.
Perhaps it understood, as I did; that this was the only way.
